Control systems direct the operations of various other systems (which can be referred to as controlled systems), such as equipment or machines, to perform many functions of the controlled systems. The control systems may direct the asset operations using software applications having a variety of different levels of criticality to the overall operation of the powered system being controlled by a control system. For example, applications that control safe operation of the controlled system, may have a higher level of criticality to the operation of the controlled system than other applications, such as applications that monitor the system, that diagnose problems with the controlled system, that provide displays to an operator, etc.
Control system platforms may support a large number of independent and dependent functions related to multiple levels of a controlled system of varying criticality that are encoded in software and executed on a merged and multi-tenant centralized or distributed hardware platform. These control system platforms may operate with the mixed criticality of the various functions by physically isolating or segregating the different functions with different hardware components of the controlled system, hard coding functionality in the different components, and/or preventing change (e.g., updates) to the controlled system. As a result, these control systems are highly restrictive in developing improvements or making other changes to the control systems.